Who Gets a Shot: A Meandering Review of Jesse Eisenberg's "Bream Gives Me Hiccups"

I go to the bookstore semi-regularly - I still order most of my books online, but my partner likes browsing the Mystery section in our local bookstore. We both love that store - it's got the right mix of books and knick-knacks (that is: mostly books, some knick-knacks), and most of all has a really, really good selection. This isn't the sort of small store that only has the hottest new books. It's big. You can browse for hours. And in one corner of the store are the piles of deeply discounted books. A lot of dreck, some hidden gems. All under $10, and definitely no refunds.

Earlier last year on a trip there I picked up a stack of books - poetry, sci-fi, a couple novels - and also, from the discount section, a copy of Jesse Eisenberg's short story collection, "Bream Gives Me Hiccups". I was drawn partly by the name on the cover (I'm a fan of Eisenberg's work, particularly the Richard Ayoade-directed "The Double"), but mostly, if I'm being honest, by the price tag: $3.99, which is cheaper than most of what I'm going to find at an actual secondhand bookstore. How bad could it be?

Well.

The first story in I was grimacing. Each subsequent one didn't get any better. The first section, 60 or 70 pages, is a bunch of restaurant reviews by a precocious nine-year old. In them we learn about his friends and broken family. Probably the nicest thing I can say is that they're not particularly good, individually or as a whole, each one typically based on some idea or conceit Eisenberg had that he ran with for half a dozen pages.

Throughout the collection, the writing is just weak. It feels like a bunch of elongated New Yorker and McSweeney's pieces, because, well, that's where he published some of these first. And it runs almost three hundred pages? Yeah, that's...yeah. I'm not surprised this was published - in the mid 2010s, Hollywood celebrity authors seemed to have a real moment, with James Franco publishing a widely-panned collection of poems with Graywolf ("Directing Herbert White"). If these sorts of things were judged purely on their merits, you can't tell me there isn't anything in the slush pile that isn't better.

In fact, in a collection of short stories that ran almost three hundred pages, there wasn't a single story I'd strongly recommend, one good hook. Nothing.

Maybe that's what I found so galling. I did, in fact, finish it, so I could one-star it on Goodreads out of spite. But there are so many things that could've been published instead, and I couldn't help but feel a pang for the authors whose work was passed over, knowingly or not. Short story collections are a very hard sell right now. Imagine getting a rejection letter from the press, seeing this come out. Reading it. Wondering just what the hell you have to do.

I guess I include myself in that group. I've had a manuscript making the rounds at a number of publishers for the last couple of years. Last year, the last of my rejections trickled in. There are more places I could send it, but I haven't yet. Maybe it needs tightening up? Reworking? Hard to say. You send it and then you get a rejection note, weeks or months or, in one case, years later. In the meantime, you read other things. Some of it's great. But a lot of it isn't. You bristle. _My work is better than this_. You can't actually back up your assertion, though. It feels like nobody believes in your work as much as you.

And people tell you otherwise, but there really are a limited number of places to publish, a handful of selections by each press. You're up against many dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other manuscripts. _You're not in competition with other authors_, they chide, _you're in community_ - but really, it's both, and every time a press puts out a bad book because they hope it'll sell, your chances become that much slimmer. There are odds, they're never in your favour, and some days, as I read "Bream Gives Me Hiccups", they feel positively unfair.

Last week I had one of my most prolific reading weeks since I was maybe twelve or thirteen. I finished four books, well over a thousand pages. "Bream Gives Me Hiccups" was the last, started and finished on a snowy Sunday, in between treks out to shovel the driveway again and again and again.

I almost wished for more snow. I finished because I made myself, not because, like the other books, I found them compelling and great. But now it's done. And maybe a lesson for me, if not around deeply discounted books, then maybe on Hollywood vanity projects. Publishers will keep publishing them. But that doesn't mean I have to take a chance on them. Instead of buying it (even at $3.99) and validating their decision to publish another Hollywood actor with a creative spark and a manuscript in the drawer, maybe I can just take a pass. Take a flier on a name I don't recognize. And then go home, and read it, and once I'm done, maybe work on my own manuscript, and start submitting again.